Are text transformations (uppercase, small-caps) broken or unwanted for your locale?

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Hi,
I'm aware of technical issues with some locales and the use of
text-transform: uppercase. One recent example is Turkish and the New tab
menu, where the capitalization was rendered incorrectly.

I'm also aware of some locales considering the use of uppercase text
simply awkward in software.

For these reasons we try to deprecate its usage, asking developers to
put the label directly in uppercase and add a localization note. One
complaint we received recently is that it prevents theme developers to
change the style of a menu [1].
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_content_best_practices#CSS_issues

One recent trend is to use font-variant: small-caps, so I wonder: is
that as broken as text-transform: uppercase for your locale? Can you
give some examples?

The only one I have is Irish [2], but I would like a confirmation on how
it should look in small-caps (my understanding is that Scottish Gaelic
should have similar issues)
http://codepen.io/flodolo/pen/KpqYjX

Francesco

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=992637
[2]
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.l10n.web/UDjtZgvH3Lg/O6T906KaJTQJ

[Sebastian Hengst]

Hi Francesco,

thank you for working on this.

There are some examples in German for which both uppercase and
small-caps look odd. These are mostly abbreviations.

Lowercasing (like Marketplace has done in the past) and capitalizing
(uppercase the first letter of each word) would cause more issues for
German.

Sebastian

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Are text transformations (uppercase, small-caps) broken or
unwanted for your locale?
Von: Francesco Lodolo [:flod] <fl...@lodolo.net>
An: Mozilla l10n Mailing List <dev-...@lists.mozilla.org>
Datum: 2015-06-13 08:42

> _______________________________________________
> dev-l10n mailing list
> dev-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n
>

[Mihovil Stanić]

I'm not really sure what you are expecting here for us to check.
I entered croatian characters (č , ć , ž , š , đ) in that webpage and
they show ok in uppercase.
Rest of alphabet is same as english letters so I guess I don't need to
check that.

Best regards,
Mihovil

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

The request is: are there special rules to transform a character/word to
uppercase/small-caps in your language? If there are, is Firefox
respecting them or are you aware of cases where if fails?

Example (Turkish): http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/turkish-i18n.html

Francesco

[Stef]

> Wiadomość napisana przez Francesco Lodolo [:flod] <fl...@lodolo.net> w dniu 13 cze 2015, o godz. 08:42:

>
> Hi,
> I'm aware of technical issues with some locales and the use of text-transform: uppercase. One recent example is Turkish and the New tab menu, where the capitalization was rendered incorrectly.
>
> I'm also aware of some locales considering the use of uppercase text simply awkward in software.
>
> For these reasons we try to deprecate its usage, asking developers to put the label directly in uppercase and add a localization note. One complaint we received recently is that it prevents theme developers to change the style of a menu [1].

> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_content_best_practices#CSS_issues <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_content_best_practices#CSS_issues>

Great! (it should)

> One recent trend is to use font-variant: small-caps, so I wonder: is that as broken as text-transform: uppercase for your locale? Can you give some examples?

I guess that would also depend if one could easily and right away recognize that the text is small-caps and not all-caps.
Font support could be other question.
The third would be, why not simply update the string to the appropriate form?

[Andrew Cunningham]

On 13/06/2015 4:43 PM, "Francesco Lodolo [:flod]" <fl...@lodolo.net> wrote:
>

> The only one I have is Irish [2], but I would like a confirmation on how
it should look in small-caps (my understanding is that Scottish Gaelic
should have similar issues)
> http://codepen.io/flodolo/pen/KpqYjX
>

This test is flawed and inconclusive.

1) you do not indicate language of text you are testing
2) you are not specifying a specific font
3) you are not specifying a font supporting an irish language system than
includes support for casing and smallcaps ( assuming such opentype fonts
exist)

Additionally, testing browser content will not tell you what would happen
in the agent UI.

I suspect the UI has a more limited implementationofopentype rendering than
available when rendering content.

Andrew

[Michael Wolf]

I can just emphasize the following sentence from the MDN page
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_content_best_practices#CSS_issues:

"In general, localizers should make the decision about capitalization."

The rules of the languages are very different so I'am afraid that we
can't find a united solution.


Regards,

Michael

[Kevin Scannell]

2015-06-13 7:03 GMT-05:00 Andrew Cunningham <lang.s...@gmail.com>:
> On 13/06/2015 4:43 PM, "Francesco Lodolo [:flod]" <fl...@lodolo.net> wrote:
>>
>
>> The only one I have is Irish [2], but I would like a confirmation on how
> it should look in small-caps (my understanding is that Scottish Gaelic
> should have similar issues)
>> http://codepen.io/flodolo/pen/KpqYjX
>>
>
> This test is flawed and inconclusive.
>
> 1) you do not indicate language of text you are testing
> 2) you are not specifying a specific font
> 3) you are not specifying a font supporting an irish language system than
> includes support for casing and smallcaps ( assuming such opentype fonts
> exist)
>

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for looking into this - it's been an ongoing source of
frustration for us, especially on mozilla.org.

Andrew's point (1) is especially important here - if you add
lang="ga" to the <p> tag on line 5 (and if you're using a recent
version of Firefox ;)), you'll see that text-transform: uppercase
actually gives the desired behavior. This is thanks to great work
that Jonathan Kew did for us in bug 1014639:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1014639

Upshot is that Irish text works correctly with text-transform:
uppercase now. font-variant: small-caps does *not* do what it should
(the example in your Pen illustrates this)

Most of the linguistic contexts in which this problem arises don't
actually occur in Scottish Gaelic. In the few that do, I believe the
standard behavior is fine. Michael Bauer might be able to confirm:
"PÀRLAMAID NA H-ALBA" is OK as an uppercase version of "Pàrlamaid na
h-Alba"?

I know Greek has an issue with smallcaps:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307039

And Turkish/Azerbaijani (and many others):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231162

Kevin

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

This test is flawed and inconclusive.
>
> 1) you do not indicate language of text you are testing
> 2) you are not specifying a specific font
> 3) you are not specifying a font supporting an irish language system than
> includes support for casing and smallcaps ( assuming such opentype fonts
> exist)
>

> Additionally, testing browser content will not tell you what would happen
> in the agent UI.
>
> I suspect the UI has a more limited implementationofopentype rendering
> than available when rendering content.
>

Hi,
in my head the purpose of that codepen was to practically show how text
transformation could break things, but I realize that it's more confusing
than helping.

I'm not sure we should focus on fonts for this discussion.

Francesco

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

> Thanks for looking into this - it's been an ongoing source of
> frustration for us, especially on mozilla.org.
>

Side note: on mozilla.org we're explicitly excluding some rules for
specific locales.

For example we override text-transform for ga-IE, font-style for Japanese
(to avoid italic), etc.
I'm guessing we should also disable font-variant for ga-IE at this point?

Francesco

[Kevin Scannell]

Yes, please.
Kevin

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

One more note to make one point clear (I realized my first message
considered that implicit): we're not talking about generic web pages, we're
talking about Firefox UI/chrome.

I simply don't consider using text transformations safe on web pages,
because there are too many variables at play (rendering engine and, yes, in
that case, fonts).

Filed bug for mozilla.org
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174423

Francesco

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 08:42:22AM +0200, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm aware of technical issues with some locales and the use of
> text-transform: uppercase. One recent example is Turkish and the New tab
> menu, where the capitalization was rendered incorrectly.
>
> I'm also aware of some locales considering the use of uppercase text simply
> awkward in software.

And there are also languages written in unicameral scripts that does not
have casing at all, so if the uppercasing is meant for emphasis then
there should be an alternate way for scripts that lack it (color,
bold, underline etc.).

Regards,
Khaled

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

For what I've seen (and remember), it's usually a "cosmetic" change, not a
semantic one.

One example: open the menu button (the "hamburger" button), click on an
item like History or Developer. The header is using small-caps.

Francesco

[Michael Bauer]

No, Gaelic behaves like Irish in this regard i.e. it needs to be
PÀRLAMAID NA h-ALBA
AN t-UACHDARAN
AR n-EACHDRAIDH

irrespective of whether its uppercase or small caps.

German has an issue with ß which traditionally uppercases to SS i.e.
Straße > STRASSE

And I'm guessing there may be other alphabets with similar characters. I
think losing graves and acutes (é > E) occurs in few systems though I
can't think of an example.

Michael


Sgrìobh Kevin Scannell na leanas 13/06/2015 aig 13:33:

[F Wolff]

My language (Afrikaans) doesn't have much in terms of the complex issues in
the other languages discussed in this thread, but I want to also emphasise
this matter about leaving capitalisation to the localiser. Even pure
stylistic things can be language dependent. For example, we don't use title
case. In the common case of trying to emphasise text, we have an
orthographic way of doing it with accents instead of using capitals.
Capitals _can_ be used, and the basic algorithms should work fine, but it
isn't necessarily culturally as appropriate.

Keep well
Friedel